CES: State of the Industry

By Tiernan Ray

Folks, we're assembled at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, the last outpost on the lower part of the Las Vegas Strip, for the first press event of this year's Consumer Electronics Show, the 'State of the Consumer Technology Industry.”

The show floor doesn't open until Tuesday. Today's briefings are intended to give journalists the important stats about things such as television sales and smartphone market growth and the like. Tonight will feature a couple or invitation-only events, from Samsung Electronics (005930KS) and Nvidia (NVDA).

Shawn Dubravac of the Consumer Electronics Association is on stage to take us through some slides. If you're interested in following along, you can see much of this data at Bit.ly/2013CEStrends.

We're getting a history lesson. Did you know the first HDTV was sold in 1998 at Dow Audio/Video in San Diego?

He's talking about four trends. The first one is a “post-smartphone era.” Apple (AAPL) kicked things off in 2007 with the first iPhone. Dubravac plays the Apple TV ad for the first iPhone. His point is that now, in 2013, we've moved away from phone calling being the primary activity of the smartphone. “We're spending the bulk of our time now on these devices doing other, non-communications activities.”

It used to be, says Dubravac, that smartphones were expected to have all their functions integrated into the device. But now the device, be it phone or tablet, is just an interface to the services, including things such as measuring your blood pressure. The smartphone has become “the viewfinder of your digital life,” a window into services, says Dubravac. He offers the example of using your phone as a mouse to manipulate objects in three-dimensional space.

Dubravac cites the invention by Charles Wheatstone in 1857 of “continuously feeding paper,” the early predecessor of the ticker tape. It's an example of how a resource that was at one time scarce can become plentiful.

Similarly, computing power was once rare and expensive but is plentiful. Likewise, sensors — microphones, accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc. — are similarly plentiful now, such as the multiple microphones on the iPhone 5. We are “wasting” those sensors as they become cheaper, says Dubravac, in the sense that we are using the surplus of the sensors to deploy them plentifully, he writes.

In the U.S. alone, 350 million devices with IP (Internet protocol) addresses will ship in 2013, notes Dubravac, a sign of the rise of connected devices.

Examples of post-smartphone invention: There will be an app shown this week that “digitizes your posture” and, one supposes, rates how good or bad your posture is. There's a service that monitors whether you've taken your prescription pills, and, if it seems you haven't, can send you a text-message alert or notify loved ones that you're not taking your medication.

You'll be seeing things such as “context-aware advertising,” which means television sets may be able to tell via a camera that your kids are watching TV and will selectively display only the appropriate advertising for a child audience, says Dubravac (whatever that may mean.)

Dubravac sees services that are similar to FourSquare that will compensate you for sharing your data because “in an age of algorithms, data is king,” he says.

The “smart TV” or “smart phone” has been using “smart” as a synonym for the thing being connected to the network. We'll see more such things, especially watches, but also things such as display windows of stores that could notify you of local deals, for example, if your local sports team just won the championship.

The last theme is the “second-screen story,” which is to say that engagement is changing with smartphones and tablets, where they are becoming a primary means of engagement for consumers and not secondary to the television set. That will affect how content providers seek to reach consumers.

There will be a “plethora of services” shown off this week for reaching that second-screen consumer, such as Audible Magic and Magic Ruby.

Dubravac wants to talk about how computing is changing. He shows a photo of himself with his 1990-era Macintosh Classic. It was the original portable computer, he says, but it wasn't an Internet device. His 1994-era laptop, while having a lot more bezel than today's models, remains the model for the clam shell laptop. The notebook computer hasn't changed a lot in 19 years.

But Dubravac thinks that is changing. Technologoes are now emerging to get away from the clam shell design he cites as an example his recent purchase of the Lenovo Twist laptop. “We'll see a plethora of touch-screens this week.”

You'll see a lot more about location-aware computers, and things such as Samsung's “bendable” displays, that “change how we think about what computing is.”

Gesture and voice is going to show up in a lot of places this year.

“I think we're at a real important inflection point for voice, says Dubravac, as basic speech recognition and speech commands have become more commonplace.

Higher-resolution screens, such as phones and tablets with hi-res displays, will have an impact on a variety of Web services, opines Dubravac, without elaborating.

This year we may sell 25,000 hi-res TV displays, says Dubravac, in the U.S. Such TVs are not yet by any means mainstream. But they are part of the larger to movement to all displays on all devices being hi-res.

Dubravac turns to the analog-to-digital trend, such as moisture sensor in a plant that notifies your phone. A variety of sensors to find your lost wallet, your lost house keys. They, and things such as health and fitness devices, are examples of things that “prompt us to take action, to do something in the analog world.”

Dubravac is wrapping up with a quote from Herbert Simon in 1956 saying that in 20 years, machines would be able to do anything a human could do. While he ended up being very wrong, says Dubravac thinks examples of cars that parallel park themselves bring us closer to what Simon envisioned.

Fun fact: We spend 170 minutes a day with a TV set, and 130 minutes a day with a mobile device of one kind or another. But while we still spend time with TV, the rate for smarphones and tablets has been rising rapidly, the rate for TV has been 'relatively stagnant” for some time.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.